Spotted this over at Okayplayer: apparently Baz Luhrmann is bringing to Netflix a mini-series about the birth of hip hop in the Bronx (as well as punk and disco elsewhere in NYC) in the late 1970s. Check out the clip below, as well as this short synopsis from The Hollywood Reporter. Looks dope!

The Get Down will focus on 1970s New York — broken down and beaten up, violent, cash strapped — dying. … Consigned to rubble, a rag-tag crew of South Bronx teenagers are nothings and nobodies with no one to shelter them — except each other, armed only with verbal games, improvised dance steps, some magic markers and spray cans. From Bronx tenements, to the SoHo art scene; from CBGBs to Studio 54 and even the glass towers of the just-built World Trade Center, The Get Down is a mythic saga of how New York at the brink of bankruptcy gave birth to hip-hop, punk and disco — told through the lives and music of the South Bronx kids who changed the city, and the world … forever.

To all our production-minded readers: Converse Rubber Tracks, a community-based recording studio in Brooklyn, has put online over ten days worth of samples! Recorded at the studio with live instrumentation, the samples are entirely royalty-free, meaning you can download and use the entire library at no cost. To convey a sense of the possibility here, the studio’s recruited some big name producers to put together tracks using the samples. This is crazy.

A couple of days ago Okayplayer posted this video of DJ Premier rehearsing with his new live band, which is apparently touring now in Japan. Not sure if they have a name yet but they’re sounding good. Super excited for this, and will definitely check them out if they ever come north to Canada.

We’ve covered Lin-Manuel Miranda before, but we’re back with a quick update. When we last discussed, Mr. Miranda had made an appearance at the White House and performed a rap about Alexander Hamilton. The New Yorker has an extensive look at our friend, and how he has turned that one song into a full fledged musical that opens soon.

It’s a pretty amazing look at the the process behind creating this production, and worth a read. Check out a snippet below:

At a workshop production in May, Miranda had delivered a final rap in which Hamilton gives an account of his preparations—“The sun is in my eyes and I’m almost giddy / As I watch it slowly rise over my New York City”—and weighs whether or not Burr has it in him to kill. Both musically and lyrically, the song hadn’t conveyed the high stakes that Miranda sought to capture, in which Hamilton’s fears about Burr’s lack of integrity extended to broad trepidation about the uncertain direction of the country. Nor had the song fully delivered a sense of tragic inevitability, in which Hamilton’s uncharacteristic reticence and Burr’s uncharacteristic forwardness ruin the lives of both men. Miranda was still revising the song, and expected to be still worrying over the scene in rehearsals. He said, “There are things that don’t exist, and that are not going to exist, until we have actors in the room, and I go, ‘Oh!’ ” Kail, who sets deadlines for Miranda, and reacts to every draft of every song, explained, “Lin’s response to pressure is to generate more material.”

Continuing our string of reddit-based posts, here’s a YouTube playlist of songs sampled by MF DOOM. For anyone interested in the art of sampling, or just a fan of good music, this is a great listen. Some sources are instantly recognizable, others take a closer listen, but in either case it’s an impressive playlist.

I was browsing Reddit today, as every productive day starts, and came across a thread about the most under appreciated album of all time. One user mentioned Gza’s Liquid Swords.

I remembered this album from when I was much younger, and honestly don’t remember it that fondly. But I took the advice in the thread and gave it another listen. That one listen made me realize I was a giant idiot in my youth, and I had missed out on gold. So, to publicly embrace my idiocy, here is an album you all probably know and love.

A little #Cancon for you this fine Monday evening: an EP of jazzy beats and complex rhymes by Montreal emcees Johnny Thursday and Berta. “Bohemian” and “Time” are first listen highlights, but the whole thing is good.